The Right Stuff
The Right Stuff is a fourth season episode of House which first aired on October 2, 2007. House runs a reality show style contest to choose a new diagnostic team. Recap A woman pilot starts hallucinating while in a flight simulator. Meanwhile, House is testing a room of forty doctors. He shows a picture of Buddy Ebsen and tells them about his allergic reaction to his Tin Man makeup and tells the interviewees to come up with alternative diagnoses. When Cuddy tells him he doesn't have the budget, he arbitrarily fires ten of them to bring himself back under budget. He then rehires one row and fires another. House's pager then rings, but it shows his number. It's the pilot in his office. She offers him $50,000 to find out what is wrong with her. She tells him if the Air Force finds out, they will ground her. She tells House that she started to hear with her eyes. House goes back to his applicants they're going to do a diagnosis without keeping notes or records. He then introduces the patient who is given the code name "Osama bin Laden". The applicants start questioning her. One applicant guesses the patient is frequently in the air and has an embolism. He then orders the applicants to do a whole bunch of tasks. However, House assigns some spare applicants to wash his car. One thinks that House just hasn't fired them and leaves along with some others. Only one continues to wash the car. Some other applicants are trying to break into the patient's house. The student who said she thought the students were wasting their time comes back and said she just did that to get others to leave. She steals House's car keys to take the car to a car wash. An older applicant finds a better way to get into the patient's house - he lies to the landlord. Other applicants tell House that the patient has elevated red blood cells. House thinks he saw Chase. The car wash applicant comes back and House orders them to put the patient in a hyperbaric chamber as they think it might be carbon monoxide poisoning. The car wash applicant also lets the others know she still has her old job and is working both of them. All of a sudden the patient has cardiac arrest. One of the applicants uses a defibrillator on her. He gets the patient's heart beating, but starts a fire in the oxygen rich environment. One doctor on the scene figure they will get fired. The patient is put on nitroglycerine and blood thinners. They start discussing new diagnosis, including Lupus. He sends three applicants to do a test, and the rest to work out sources of infections. Wilson goes over the possible infections with House. House tells Wilson he saw Chase. Wilson tells House that Chase is in a Mayo Clinic satellite in Arizona. Wilson thinks House feels guilty about firing Chase. The applicants do an endoscopic echocardiogram on the patient's heart. However, they find no abnormalities. House orders a test for hypothyroidism. During the test, the patient starts suffering from symptoms unrelated to the test, including the hallucinations she had in the simulator. She runs out of the room with a psychotic attack. They call House when she locks herself in a room, otherwise security will know she's in the hospital. One of the applicants threatens to blab her secret, and when House says he knows it, she bursts out of the room. House thinks he sees Cameron. Cuddy comes along and sees them with the patient and wonders who she is. They tell her its Osama bin Laden. Cuddy goes to the applicants and asks who the patient is. One of the nineteen applicants knows who she is. Cuddy tells House to keep a chart on her. House fires the guy who ratted. He goes back to the diagnosis. He fires another applicant for tattling as well. He tells the applicants they can't test the patient any more because there would be records. House goes to Wilson telling him he saw Cameron. He also asks how to scan a liver without scanning it. Wilson blows him off on both counts. He thinks House is hallucinating and he will next see an African American Cameron with blonde hair. Wilson shows that Cameron is with Chase in Arizona and has just left a message for him. Wilson thinks House is getting ready to choose people he doesn't like so they can't hurt him. House tells the applicants they have to stress the patient's liver. He re-fires one applicant, then re-hires him when he suggests giving the patient alcohol. He wants to get a Mormon applicant to act as a control subject by giving him alcohol. They give the patient and the control subjects (including House himself) tequila. He discusses religion with the Mormon, and why he fell for a logical argument. The Mormon brands House as an atheist. House thinks he sees Foreman. All of a sudden the patient has trouble breathing. House is chasing Foreman. Cuddy tells House he's at New York Mercy Hospital. She realizes House has been drinking. He goes back to the patient's room, and finds her missing. They took her to a treadmill to give her oxygen - they will show merely a routine test rather than an emergency. House starts to percuss the patient's chest listening for abnormalities. He figures it's lung cancer. The patient refuses surgery because of the scar. House says they need to give the patient surgery. The plastic surgeon in the crowd can't hide the scars. However, he suggests breast augmentation - the scars will be in the same place. The patient eventually agrees. Cuddy confronts House about the reason he's doing such a surgery, but backs down when he threatens to tell her what is really going on. They do a biopsy during the augmentation. They start discussing diagnoses in the operating room. All of a sudden Chase appears on the observation deck with the answer - Von Hippel-Lindau syndrome. House wonders if he is hallucinating, but the applicants confirm he is there. Chase tells him he's now on the surgical staff. House and Wilson argue with each other about not letting House know that Chase and Cameron are back at the hospital in new jobs. However, Foreman really is at New York Mercy. They tell the patient she's fine for now, but the syndrome will affect her for the rest of her life. House comes in and tells the patient he has already called NASA. House picks six applicants to stay. He confronts one rejected applicant who said she did nothing wrong, but he tells her that she didn't take any risks. He tells the oldest applicant that he knows he never went to medical school, but agrees to keep him on as an assistant to give advice. He goes to see the now blonde Cameron. He thinks she's wasting her time in the ER. She asks why House ratted her out, but he admits he didn't - he just said he did to keep the others from calling. Notes The hallucination sequences are reminiscent of the hyperspace sequence in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey Category:Episodes 2007/10/02